Embotics Boosts Virtual Tool, V-Commander Management Capabilities

Tag : bmc machine
As it was launched last September, V-Commander 1.0 was representedas software that could watch over and prevent virtual machine"sprawl," where VMs are created faster than they can be tracked.
Version 2.0 has several added capabilities, said David Lynch, VP ofmarketing, in an interview. Its capacity to group virtual machinesand apply policies to them has been expanded through its policyengine, which can assign policies at various stages of building anddeploying a VM, or at additional stages of its life cycle.
Its reporting capabilities have been enhanced to allow ITadministrators to create custom reports, such as a report on allVMs created for a particular line of business and the resourcesthey're consuming. The number of VMs associated with a particularproject that are running Windows can be isolated and reported on.The cost of the virtual software licensing, gigabytes of storage, CPU time, and technical support time can be constructed in suchreports, giving administrators a means of establishing chargebacks,said Lynch.
It's gained the ability to connect to IBM Tivoli, BMC Software, andNovell PlateSpin's asset management applications. If a systemmanagement system, such as Tivoli or BMC Patrol, issues a workticket that says "remove this virtual machine from the environment,V-Commander can react to that," said Lynch. V-Commander can accepta new virtual machine coming into the environment through the systems management administrator. V-Commander, however, doesn't currently connect toHP's Network Node Manager/Operations Manager (formerly OpenView)management suite or CA's UniCenter, although Lynch said a systemmanagement API is available that would allow a customer to do so on his own.
Embotics displayed V-Commander 2.0 in its booth at the Gartner ITInfrastructure, Operations & Management Summit 2008 in Orlando,Fla., earlier this week. It will become generally available July 11at a price of $10,000, plus $3,000 per instance of VMware ESXrunning. Embotics is a private firm founded in 2006 in Ottawa,Canada, backed by the venture capital from Tera Capital.